To Mom and Dad Contents Author’s Note vi Introduction by Graydon Carter viii Prologue 1 Office Space 7 Happy All the Time 12 Ingredients 19 Was It Him? 25 Trial by Salad 30 Crossing Bloomingdale’s 37 South by Southwest 46 Benediction 53 Twelve Smoking Ducks 58 Blue Chili 66 Gold Leaf and Turbot 71 The Waverly Juice 78 The Brothers Calamari 86 Waltz for PJ 92 iv Reluctant Patty 100 Running from Stilettos 107 Angst Hampton 112 Food and Marriage 120 The Conversation 126 Park Babylon South 131 French Roast 140 Odd Pairing 147 Under New Management 154 More Butter 161 Reduction 169 Piatti Secondi 178 The Man 185 Mac & Jeez! 195 Unhinged 202 Adrenaline Junkie 207 Coda 217 Epilogue 223 Acknowledgments About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher v CONTENTS Author’s Note Some names, dates, places, and chronology of events have been changed or altered. I apologize to those whose stories were left on the cutting- room floor. I also apologize to those who wish their stories were left on the cutting-room floor. Introduction When a small group of us bought The Waverly Inn in 2005, I was a rela- tive newcomer to the hospitality trade (if you don’t count thirty-five years of dining out as an editor with a liberal expense account). I may not have known a thing about how a restaurant worked, but I did know what I expected in return for my trade and 20 percent tip: convivial sur- roundings, gentle lighting, crisp service, and good food. The Waverly Inn—at least in my years in New York—was a stranger to all of the above. It was not without its charms, however—a compelling history being one of them. The restaurant opened its doors when Babe Ruth was still pitching for the Red Sox. It was originally billed as a tearoom, a concept that had less to do with the tastes of its proprietors and more to do with timing: the 1919 Volstead Act, ushering in Prohibition, had been passed the year before. Set as it was in a charming little nook carved out of the ground floor of a Greenwich Village brownstone with a garden out back, The Waverly Inn survived that initial, ill-advised period of temperance and passed through many hands as the century progressed. Rumor has it that the restaurant once fronted for a brothel. Fact has it that it had been owned by the secretary to Clare Boothe, then the managing editor of viii Vanity Fair—a coincidence I found interesting, to say the least. That she went on to marry Henry Luce, founder of Life and Time magazines (both of which I have worked for), was another point in the restaurant’s favor. (As was the fact that Dawn Powell, whose 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born, was based on the Luce-Boothe marriage, lived across the way at 23 Bank Street.) More recently—and in relative decrepitude—the restaurant was a haunt operating in blissful disobedience of New York City’s smoking ban, which, I will freely admit, further enamored me of the place. We wanted the front room of the restaurant to have the clubby cul- ture and warm, flattering lighting of Elaine’s on the Upper East Side, or Harry’s Bar, in Mayfair. And we wanted the conservatory—the garden room out back—to be warm and cheery, with a nod to San Lorenzo, in Kensington. Most important, since all the owners live in the neighbor- hood, we wanted The Waverly Inn & Garden (as it has officially been known) to be a local restaurant—the kind of place where the barman begins pouring your old fashioned after recognizing the pitter-patter of your footsteps as you made your way down to the door. The little I knew about running a restaurant was matched only by my ignorance of the actual preparation of food. Aside from occasional stints in front of an outdoor grill or a campfire, I’ve cooked maybe a few dozen meals in my life. As a result, I have boundless admiration for anyone who can disappear into the kitchen and whip up something as simple as a ham sandwich. When it comes to restaurants, I’ve never been comfortable eating in places where small, precious dishes are self- consciously arranged on fragile, outsize china. I don’t like foam. I don’t like the solemn hush of the four-star dining room. Or having the food redescribed to me once it hits the table. Nor do I welcome the arrival of amuse-bouches—those little “gifts” chefs send out to make you feel special, until you look around and realize that everyone else has them ix INTRODUCTION too. These extras not only delay the courses you’ve actually ordered, but are often followed by a visit from the owner or chef. We all sensed that The Waverly Inn had to serve food befitting its raffish history, with classic American dishes that had all but disappeared from contemporary New York menus. I looked to my favorite restau- rants for influences. The original menu we drew up included the famed chili they used to serve at Chasen’s, in Beverly Hills; the roast chicken from L’Ami Louis, in Paris; and the McCarthy Salad from the Bel-Air Hotel. The draft menu even included butter tarts, a Canadian delicacy (yes, you Yankee philistines, such a thing exists) that never quite caught on in the States. My mother, who is said to make the best ones in east- ern Canada, was going to educate the pastry chef in the fine craft of but- ter tart fabrication. Such a menu demanded a chef who could reintroduce these dishes and make them better, and healthier, than they had been before. In the movies, John DeLucie, who became not only our chef but also our part- ner, would play the guy who, despite all the odds, ends up with the girl. Charming, even-tempered, and wise in the ways of a true New Yorker, he is a natural chef who cooks not simply with his mind and palette but with his gut. As you’ll see in the pages ahead, John also came into the restaurant business later in life, having spent the first half as a chef-in-hiding much the way William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens were poets who practiced medicine and sold insurance to pay the bills. It took an early- middle-age epiphany—older readers might appreciate the feeling—to retrieve him from the business world (in his case, executive recruiting) and bring him publicly into the kitchen. When we began sampling dishes, a number of us—investors, friends, family, and Emil Varda, our estimable manager and partner—decamped to La Bottega, the bustling Italian trattoria operated by fellow owners INTRODUCTION x Sean McPherson and Eric Goode, who were tossing drunks out of night- clubs when you were in kneesocks. By my side, in addition to my wife and kids, were two old chums. One was Brian McNally, the charming restaurateur behind The Odeon, Indochine, and 44—festive haunts that kept you in their embrace long after you should have gone home, and places that have compelled countless writers, editors, and ad men suffer- ing from “cocktail flu” the next morning to call in sick. And there was the renowned wit Fran Lebowitz, a lay restaurant expert who likes to eat out as much as I do and is rarely shy in holding back an opinion. Early on, we ate an extraordinary meal: beautifully prepared foie gras, bone marrow, and pork belly. It was as tasty as all get-out, but it wasn’t right for our restaurant—too ornate, too fussy, suited more for Whitehall than for The Waverly. Who wants to own a restaurant where the menu becomes the dinner conversation? Rather than insist- ing on flexing his chef’s muscles, John agreed, and embarked on another course. It so happened that a few weeks later, as he was exploring The Wa- verly’s kitchen, John unearthed a stack of old menus from the restau- rant’s heyday, printed on the thick, old paper stock that banks once used. The choices were simple ’40s classics—steak, oysters on the half shell, chicken potpie—with barely a line of description beneath each dish. Per- fecting these exact dishes, he knew, would be the key to the restaurant’s success. And instead of overpowering them with fashionable culinary flourishes, he decided to restore them to perfection. (He may have gone a bit overboard on the American classic macaroni and cheese, enliven- ing it with white truffles and a fifty-five-dollar price tag that made the front pages of the city’s esteemed tabloids. If you haven’t tasted it, sell a few hundred shares of bank stock and give it a try.) While there were many contributors to the success of the restaurant, John deserves credit for envisioning a sumptuous and unpretentious menu that would lure xi INTRODUCTION regulars back two and sometimes three times a week in search of simple dishes that they had forgotten could be so good. John’s success in the kitchen never surprised me. What did, how- ever, was his skill as a writer. You learn a thing or two hanging around restaurants for half your life, and John has turned that seasoned eye to himself and to this city. I remember his brand of hunger from my own days as a young man, and I know that those desperate, early days only whet the appetite for what lies ahead, and that for John DeLucie they have made his success even more delicious.